


The Tale of a Mountain Man

by ArmedWithAStaringFly



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Movie, character backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 10:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmedWithAStaringFly/pseuds/ArmedWithAStaringFly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It is not always clear who is destined for greatness." The little boy riding on a reindeer had to come from somewhere. He was the child of two people named for ice, so ice was his fate. From his birth to his life with the rock trolls, this is Kristoff's story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tale of a Mountain Man

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first story to be published for AO3, though I've been writing fanfiction for years. This is actually a sequel of sorts to a similar story I wrote for Flynn Rider years ago, called The Tale of a Rider. 
> 
> The first chapter focuses more on his parents then Kristoff himself, but I promise that won't be the case for long!

It is not always clear who is destined for greatness.

Much like wickedness, bitterness, love, or hate, heroism can be thrust upon a person unwanted, at least at the time. Greatness might come to a person you passed on the street and didn’t give a second glance (or even a first). Greatness might come to a child you shooed away when he tried to pinch a coin from your purse. Greatness might come to the boy who sold you ice today.

Kristoff wasn’t yet used to greatness. He was used to being unnoticed and barely needed by other people, which is how he preferred it, of course. However, somehow along the line he became a hero of Arendelle and the consort of a princess (both of which still shocked him a bit when he wakes up in the morning, and he wonders if they always will). And though there were certainly many perks to that status besides Anna herself (never, ever again being thirty coins short in shops being among them), there were a fair number of downsides as well, namely people actually expressing interest in where he came from.

Kristoff didn’t talk much about that particular story, not that anyone usually asked him. To tell folks of his life implies a closeness and intimacy he was not comfortable with. But a lot had been changing lately.

“Where were you born? I assumed you came from somewhere other than the trolls,” Anna had asked as she leaned back on his legs, freckles even more prominent with her smiling in the sun. They were huddled in the snow in the gardens of the castle, hidden away from servants and even Elsa herself, though nobody was making an effort to search them out.

He tried to match her smile, but even she saw the uneasiness to it and shrugged.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.” Despite her words, she quickly sat up wide eyed. “Why? What happened? Is it _bad_?”

“No! I’m just…” He found his fingers scratching his neck without any itch, “not really used to people asking.”

“Oh, that’s a relief. You had me worried there.” Anna lay back on his legs and sighed in content. “You can tell me when you’re ready.”

Kristoff stared up to a pair of ice sickles pointing towards him like daggers and glittering in the sunlight. He knew where he came from. He knew thanks to a man named Sven.

* * *

 

There once were two children that had known each other since the day they were born, but absolutely, definitively, and seemingly eternally despised each other.

Their mothers, best friends since childhood and sisters by all but bloodline, gave birth within hours of each other in the middle of a furious storm that nearly froze the doors of the midwife’s hut shut. They held each other’s hands tight throughout the ordeal, knuckles white and faces sweating.  The poor midwife, a withered middle-aged woman named Modir, wobbled between both beds as fast as her shivering knees could take her, wiping their foreheads with rags while throwing more blankets around their shoulders and legs all while stuffing more bundles of cloth into the cracks around the hut door and keeping the fire fed and hot. No use in all this work, she had said, if the babies were just going to freeze as soon as they came out.

But they, like any normal babies, came out warm and wrinkled and screaming. The girl came first, starting a lifelong tradition of never letting herself be beaten by her male counterpart. Her mother’s tears nearly froze as her husband handed the baby to her, but the love she instantly felt warmed her heart and before spreading to her whole body. She took a moment to glance at her friend, still suffering through labor, and though the latter was in horrible pain, she was still able to look over long enough for them to have an instant understanding.

Ice. Ice surrounded their child’s birth, so ice shall be their names. The girl was named Nilak, and once the boy emerged he was christened Jaki, both meaning different forms of ice.  

Perhaps it was this moment, this understanding, that wrote the fate of these two children and the child they would one day sire.

Nilak and Jaki grew up in huts side by side in Tolben, a village so small and rugged that most never saw it through the flurry of the snow. Those that did assumed it to be the scraps of a settlement long abandoned until they saw the reindeer and horses huddled together in their pasture and the thin lines of smoke rising to the sky from the huts like clouds made of ash and soot. Like most mountain people, for the people of Tolben the world outside the rocks and snow was a mystery, practically nonexistent in their everyday thoughts usually consumed by “Live, Eat, Work.” The kingdom of Arendelle was a land that bought their hard harvested ice, nothing more, nothing less.

From the days of their infancy, it seemed that Nilak and Jaki could simply just not get along. Their mothers, desperate to make them friends, let nary a day go by that they visited each other’s homes with their babies in tow, only to find them rolling and biting on the floor within a few minutes. Every day, their two unfortunate mothers would sigh in disappointment but still convince themselves that it was just a phase and that the next day they would be inseparable for life. But as they continued to grow, their dreams never came true.

Nilak quickly learned that the boy was particularly sensitive to a hard yank on his ear. Jaki quickly learned that a harsh tug on her blonde hair brought a yelp in pain. Nilak found that she could get a tear or two by calling him a big-nosed freak. Jaki found that she would immediately retreat from battle if he called her a snot-nosed baby. Nilak knew what foods made him sick to his stomach. Jaki knew what scary masks and live animals made her squeal in fear.

Jaki had a lot to prove in this village. Every boy did, being a land of survival of the fittest. Every boy wanted to be seen riding their horses the fastest, jumping off the highest ice cliff into the soft snow below, lifting their father’s iron pickaxe the highest and coming the closest to actually swinging it. So imagine Jaki’s despair when there was a little yellow-haired girl right next door who seemed determined to beat him at everything.

“It’s not _my_ fault if you’re too slow, “ she sneered, tongue out as she danced in circles around him and dodged every snowball he flung her way, “maybe if you weren’t such a big oaf you could win for once.”

The running race was supposed to be boys only; that’s how the children had planned it. The girls were supposed to watch, cheer, and argue over who was going to marry the victor when they got big. Jaki was in the lead, and he had already tasted the sweet victory. His lips had curled into a smug smile, heavy breaths ghosting into the chilled air and filling his lungs with the dry coldness. All the other boys would have to give him the fur coats off their backs and walk home to their mothers, shaking in cold and shame. But before he had reached the finish line, he’d seen a fur skirt and bouncing familiar blonde hair whizz past him and cross over the line in the snow with a not-very-graceful leap.

The other boys were roaring in laughter at him being beaten by a girl, seemingly forgetting that they too were beaten by a mile.

“You big, fat, stinky, smelly…” he shouted every insult he could muster at her, but she laughed them off and shot them right back. He felt fire coursing into his cheeks despite the cold. His fists balled up, teeth clenched, and he had the overwhelming urge to scream in frustration.

And through the fights, the wrestles, the watching each other for signs of weakness, the two children came to know each other better than anyone else in the world.

Then one day, the sun rose and normal and set as normal, the mountain stood large and solid as normal, and the full moon shown as normal, but still everything changed.

The summer months had melted the snow leaving only patches of brown grass, so the ice harvesters had to travel farther north from the mountain to the Arctic sea to find their goods. It was Jaki’s first ice harvest, so he had packed up his furs and father’s axe and set off in the caravans to prove his transition to manhood. There he slipped on the smooth surface of the frozen lake and fumbled as he sawed through the ice, making every amateur mistake and having every other man make sure he knew it. He was bigger and buffer than most, but in an art that needed grace and precision as well as strength, that didn’t do him much good. For someone whose name meant ice, it hurt that he wasn’t a natural.

“Why don’t you go home and stick to herding? That’s a profession more suited for you,” a boy his age hissed at him as he pushed past, perfectly cut ice cube heaved over his shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Jaki tried to knock it off with his fist, but his father grabbed him back and threw him against the cart.

“I’ll have no battles in here, son. Not around the merchandise.” The man left him fuming silently by the horse. Three months of back-breaking work, too little food, and cold, cold nights, and all he had proven was his own incompetence. As if this could get any worse.

Nilak was tending the cooking fire, pushing and pulling the sparking logs with a poker as the meat sizzled on a plate above it. She didn’t much like home work. She’d rather be driving the horses and reindeer or fixing up the huts, which thankfully was more acceptable for her to take part in when most of the able-bodied men were away ice harvesting. Still, cooking was an important job too, and so she resigned herself to a fate of boredom.

She was just pulling the meat from the firepit when her mother bust through the door with elation. “The men have returned from the harvest!”

Nilak’s heart twisted inside. That meant that she would be even more resigned to the jobs of the hut than she was before, but at the same time her father was coming home.

“Jaki will be back!” her mother said with a wink.

Nilak’s face fell. “ _Joy_.”

“Let’s go meet him!”

And that is how Nilak found herself grumbling out in the mud and grass waiting for a boy she had hated since the day she was born. No matter how many peppy conversations her mother attempted, she felt that she had to hang her head and cross her arms even harder. Simply out of principle.

“There he is!” Nilak’s mother, who had practically adopted the boy since his own died, cried as she rushed towards him with her arms thrown open. Jaki hugged her with what almost seemed like relief, because despite his dislike for her daughter, he had nothing against this kind woman.

“Hello, Jaki.” Nilak called out to the boy with complete disinterest, absolutely not noticing that his shoulders were broader, his muscles visible through his shirt, that he towered above her mother, and that his brown hair was pulled back away from his blue eyes. He looked up.

Only for his jaw to drop.

Nilak met his eyes, only for her own face to fall to confusion. He was staring at her like she was a ghost, like something he had never seen, and not the girl he had seen literally every day of his young life.

“What is your pro—“ she hadn’t finished the sentence before he took off running towards the mountains.

The women stood in silence and shock.

“That happened,” Nilak whispered.

“What! Is! _Wrong_! With! You!” Nilak trudged through the thick mud around the mountain pool. The hem of her skirt was caked, her boots were ruined, and her temper boiling. She had been hunting for that stupid boy for hours after her mother broke down crying, and she when she saw him standing there alone on the edge of the water she decided she was just about done with him, his stupid face, his stupid voice, just stupid, stupid him.

“Oh no…” she heard him groan. Her teeth clenched and she marched forward faster, grabbing his shoulder and spinning him to face her.

“My mother has no idea why you just ran off on her like a spooked seal!” she shouted, tossing her hands out in her active way of speaking. “And for that matter, neither do I so you better have a _damn_ good excuse for whatever that was!” She stopped and watched him, expecting an insult, a shove, _something._

He simply stared at her dumbfounded.

“Did you leave your brain out in the Arctic?” Nilak snapped.

“I…I…” his tongue fumbled in his mouth, eyes desperate and uneasy. He swallowed, like the words he wanted to say were down his throat. “Have you looked at a reflection lately?” he finally squeaked.

“AUGH!” Nilak clenched her fists around her braids so hard they turned white, practically ripping them out in frustration. “You actually just insult my appearance in a time like this? That wasn’t even a clever one! I know for a _fact_ you can do better than _that_!”

He was silent.

She didn’t know what to do anymore. This boy, this _dumb dumb_ boy, had her at her wits end and he just wouldn’t _budge_ …she wanted to scream, to shout, to kick and the ground and him, and she turned away so she wouldn’t do just that and—

She saw her reflection in the pool for the first time all summer, and she saw what he saw. She too was taller, but it was more than that. She had the hints of womanly shape that poked through the loose linen of her dress. Her face was more slender, and it was…pretty.

“Oh,” she whispered with her sudden realization. She couldn’t even look back up at Jaki.

“I’m an idiot,” he moaned.

 _True_ , she thought.

She forced her head up to meet his eyes. _His blue, blue eyes_ … _wait, what? Stop that!_ And then, she realized that she didn’t even need to look at him to know his eye color; it was branded into her mind. She knew the exact sound of his voice, his favorite food, his favorite song. She knew the exact hour when he was born, just a few after herself. She knew his _shoe size_ , for God’s sake, and there was hardly a memory of her childhood that didn’t somehow include Jaki.

But she couldn’t stand him! But… _why_? And in the long line of realizations that day, Nilak discovered that she couldn’t actually think of a _reason_ for her dislike for him. It was just what she had always done.

She was at loss for words.

She wanted to punch him, she wanted to hug him. She wanted to yell, she wanted to cry. She wanted to push him in the water, she wanted to…

And that day, as the sun dipped below the horizon painting colors of yellow and violet on the calm pool, the ice children kissed for the first time.

* * *

 

Nilak tried to ignore her mother’s elation at seeing the two walking back to the village hand in hand. The woman thankfully spouted no “I told you so!”s and instead made them a hot meal to celebrate, using the meat Nilak had made and then some. As Nilak was tying up the horses for the night, Jaki came up behind her.

“Will you marry me?” he asked quietly.

She spun around with a start. “Are you insane? We just—“

“I’ve known you my entire life. I don’t know how I can possibly know you any better than I do now,” Jaki said without a hint of sarcasm. His face was purely genuine, and she shrugged in compliance.

“You’re right, of course. Yes, I’ll marry you.” They kissed for the second time that night, Nilak’s feet off the ground and her heart in the air.

With a fiancée to marry and a future to plan, Jaki had new motivation to excel at ice harvesting. Every ice chunk he collected got him closer to paying for his marriage. He was no more graceful and skilled, but he was certainly efficient, and even his cruelest detractors were impressed at how he continued to drive his saw into the ice even when they were taking a brief rest. Nilak similarly spent her days working in the pastures, feeding and herding the livestock. Her favorites, though she couldn’t really explain why, were the few reindeer. Whenever a new calf was born, she was the one up in the middle of the night nursing the mother through the ordeal and naming the baby tottering on its new legs, and the village came to see the herd of reindeer as hers by right. It was not uncommon for the other villagers to see her lying down in the grass with the animals, stroking their necks and muttering words to them as if they could understand.

She was spreading the hay out for the horses one winter day when Jaki scooped her up from behind and spun her through the air. She had heard him coming, of course, because one does not know someone for that long and not be able to sense their presence, but she acted surprised for his sake.

“I’ve done it!” he shouted in near tears. “I have enough money! Now we can marry!”

Her own tears dripped on his cheek as she squealed in delight, throwing her arms around his neck and laughing until her lungs hurt.

The ice children married in the dead of winter, their visible breaths mixing as they danced close and the northern lights singing their praises.  

* * *

 

“I’m going with you,” Nilak said again at the door of their hut. Jaki and his father had spent the better part of their engagement building the cozy, box-like little thing out of straw and wood, and Nilak was perfectly accepting of its simplicity, preferring the outside to any home.

“Women don’t go on these expeditions.” Jaki bundled up his ice harvesting equipment with a huff and flung it over his shoulder. She shook her head, stomping her foot defiantly. Jaki couldn’t help but roll his eyes; that didn’t work when they were children, and it wasn’t going to work now.

“Maybe they don’t, but I do. The horses are young and undertrained, and no one knows them like me.” _This was true_ , Jaki thought, but that didn’t change that the other men would still get ruffled and bothered by the presence of a woman on the caravan.

But Nilak was Nilak, and in the end there was nothing he could do to change her mind. After that day, Nilak went on every ice harvesting expedition with her husband to care for the horses, and the men, though uncomfortable at first, came to accept her presence. Not that it mattered to her much anyway.

* * *

 

“My monthly cycle didn’t come.” Jaki choked on his stew, spilling meat and roots all over when his spoon clattered to the ground. He fell into a coughing fit until his wife gave him a swift hit on the back with a slightly insulting deadpan look on her face.

“W-what?”

“I’m probably pregnant. We should prepare for a baby. Thought you would want to know.” She shrugged, trying to appear blasé, but Jaki could see the nervous shake in her hands as she picked up his spoon and the pleading in her eyes for him not to be upset. “It’s early in our marriage for this, I understand. Not even a year has passed.”

“No no, this is wonderful!” Jaki leapt from his chair and danced over to scoop her up, only to stop with a start three inches from her waist. Nilak looked down in confusion to see him staring at her stomach with what looked like terror.

“What’s wrong?” she asked with a stronger tinge of disappointment than she had intended. She really had gotten quite used to him picking her up.

“Will I hurt the baby if I lift you?”

She punched him in the arm.

Nilak continued to take part in the expeditions, even as her stomach was continuing to grow. That child developed through blizzards and hail, almost never reaching a warm day; in the summer it was with the ice harvesters, in the winter at the village herding reindeer. Nilak’s mother joked that the child would have a fate more surrounded by ice and cold than even the ice children themselves, though she never lived to see just how correct she was.

At first, Nilak tried to hide her pregnancy from the ice harvesters so not to alarm them the way she did her husband, but that didn’t work for long; they noticed her stomach and they noticed that she sat down by the dinner fire far more slowly than she used to.  As her condition continued, some expressed concern for having such a heavily pregnant woman on a fairly dangerous mission; after all, ice broke, the cold was merciless, horses reared, and food was rationed. They were mostly ignored, however, because while the others questioned the morality of it all as well, they were not about to challenge Nilak. She’d be even more determined to prove her ability. Nothing good would have come from that.

But there came a point when her husband finally put his foot down. The caravan was leaving for an extra autumn excursion due to low sales in the summer, and Nilak, as always, insisted her presence.

“This is ridiculous. You can hardly ride the horses anymore, and the baby could come any time now.”

“I can ride them just fine!” she pouted like a child, arms crossed and head low. “and I probably won’t give birth for another couple—“

“Early births _happen,_ Nilak! And do you really want to risk giving birth in the middle of an ice field surrounded only by men who don’t know a single thing about birthing them?”

This stopped her. No, she did not. She rubbed her stomach slowly, feeling the baby shift inside her restlessly—it was not one to stand still. It was big, too. Even her loosest linen dresses stretched against her belly.

“Fine,” she whispered just over a breath. Jaki smiled and kissed her cheek, and that was that. The men left at sunrise the next morning, Nilak watching with envious eyes as their silhouettes disappeared over the yellow light. _Will this be the rest of my life?_ she thought, before stepping back to the shadows of the hut.

As it turned out, Jaki had reason to worry.

Nilak was brushing one of her favorite reindeer (it was one of the few remaining females in the herd, and she had a feisty streak with a name, Gundis, to match it) when she felt it. Her hand leapt to her enlarged abdomen as the pressure hit. She knew what it meant. Everyone knew. A trail of water trickled down her thigh. Her heart pounded in her chest. It was time, and she was at a complete loss.

Should she move? Was that safe? She couldn’t possibly have a baby way out in the field…she’d heard the women in the midwife’s hut screaming expletives into the night and the village parents gently covering their children’s ears to spare them. She did not want to be one of those women.

“MAMA!” she cried as she moved towards her hut, not sure whether to run or waddle or _what_. When she heard the padded footsteps of her mother over the grass, her eyes were squeezed shut as pain shot through her body with another contraction. “Mama…” she whimpered, grabbing the woman’s hand and letting herself be lead to the midwife’s hut.

“Shh, shh my girl…” the older woman whispered, patting her daughter’s back like she did when she was a child.

The old woman tutted as Nilak was lain back on her bed. “Two generations of yours I’ve birthed, on both sides of the family,” Modir said, “and none have been easy.” Nilak groaned.

“Don’t tell me that.”

“No use in lying, child.”

Nilak was quiet for a few moments, sweat beading at her brow and breaths shallow. “Will it take long?” she squeaked.

Modir chuckled, setting a towel on her head. “Probably.”

The sun set, rose, and set again, with no baby yet to show for it. Nilak pushed and breathed and pushed and breathed, feeling like her body was tearing in two with time itself slowing down to worsen her agony. She had been correct in assuming the baby was big, and it was apparently also quite stubborn. Her mother squeezed her hand the way she had the child’s other grandmother so many years ago, wearing a smile that Nilak secretly wanted to swipe off her face.

“Baby of the ice children,” her mother mumbled with a wink , “of course it would be as antagonistic as possible.” Nilak couldn’t argue with that.

“It’s coming my girl! It’s finally coming!” Modir said from the other end of the bed. “Keep going!”

Tears streamed down the girl’s face as she cursed the universe, but mostly her husband.

But then, the most peculiar thing happened.

Nobody noticed the temperature drop, least of all the exhausted mother spread out on the table. Nobody noticed the clouds collect. Nobody expected it, because it was still far too early. But as the young woman’s anguished cries mixed with an older woman’s shouts of “It’s a boy!”, the sky opened up into flurries of snow.

Nilak’s mother was the first to notice, and she stood from her relieved daughter cradling and clutching the heavy boy in her shaking arms to look out the doorway. Nilak tore her eyes away from her son to see the look on her mother’s face, one of wonder with a small smile of knowingness. She knew instantly what the woman was thinking.

“It means nothing, Mama. It snows all the time here.” Her mother shook her head slowly, smile growing into a grin. She looked back up to the sky as the white crystalline flakes flurried around her from the inky twilight.

“No. It is an omen.”

“Of what?”

The woman sat back down on her daughter’s bed. She felt tears drip down her cheeks as she saw the love in Nilak’s eyes when looking at her son, burning through the shadows of the night. The girl bopped her son’s nose, so similar to his fathers, giggling even as he continued to cry.

“I don’t know. But he is your child, so we can only guess.”

Perhaps it was an omen, perhaps only a coincidence. Perhaps the ultimate fate of the children named for ice was a coincidence too. No one can ever know for sure.

“What are you naming him?”

“We already had a boy name picked out. After Jaki’s grandfather.”

“Good choice.”

Nilak rubbed her baby’s soft forehead with her thumb. “Hello, Kristoff.”


End file.
